Digital RoundUP 18/02/2013

PushON | February 18th 2013

Welcome to a new feature from the PushON team, every Monday we will be putting our Digital RoundUP blog online. This is your chance to catch up on the news from the last 7 days within the digital sector.

Mailbox Email App Release

To start the week off, we were given the opportunity to test out the latest Mailbox app to be released on the iPhone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CICMxwgm274

After reading the article in Mashable we signed up for the app using the reservation system they initially set up. Once the app was released onto the app store we were up and running within 24 hours in the queue, starting at 6,000 with 600,000+ people behind, all waiting to see what the hype around the app was about. Due to this long drawn out process we heard mixed opinions from people about having to wait this long to use an app, with Arj in the office starting at around 950,000 and only just passing 600,000 today (some 7 days later).

The app is great for Gmail users as it instantly encourages you to tidy up your inbox, sorting through all the archived emails and spam in one go. When starting up, I was prompted with the information that I had 1,500 unread emails (I’m blaming the iPhone Mail app for this). After a few hours sorting through all the emails, I was informed that within ‘Settings‘ you could change the ‘Badge Count‘ to ‘Show 1 for new messages‘, a quick fix for those who don’t have the time to trawl through the 100’s of unread emails that have been archived through the iPhones original ‘Mail‘ app.

Another useful tool built into the ‘Settings‘, is the Snoozes option, where you can Start your day at say 8:00 AM, Start the weekend at 10:00 AM and End your day at 6:00 PM to ensure that you are not overrun with constant notifications once you are out of work hours.

Overall, the app is the perfect alternative to the iPhone’s built in Mail app and provides some stiff competition and potential features for iPhone to mull over if they want to improve their services. The ease of swiping right to save or delete and swiping left to archive or remind yourself at a later date is a real dream to use and it will have you swiping from right to left all day.

We give this app a 4 out of 5, if you didn’t have to wait to use it then we would give it 5 out of 5.

Lego’s director of social media Lars Silberbauer said that “everyone in a company needs to get what it is to be social”.

Anyone who uses social media at Lego were already subjected to a development programme. Participants undertake a day-long course which culminates in a theoretical and practical exam.

Silberbauer emphasised the value of social media;

“We have four ways of creating value out of creating engagement,” he said. “Increasing sales, becoming more efficient in our marketing, building brand affinity and protecting our brand via social media.”

Yandex passes Bing to become 4th Largest Search Engine

Yandex (the Russian search engine) surpasses Microsoft’s Bing on the number of monthly search queries worldwide. Bing did 4.477 billion queries and Yandex did 4.844 billion, although both were eclipsed by Google with 114.73 billion queries and a 65.2% market share.

In third place was the Chinese search engine Baidu, so what does this all mean?

Put simply, the audience growth in Russia is on an upward trajectory whereas in the Western markets it has somewhat stagnated. 2013 could prove to be Bing’s toughest year.